So part of the deal of Nicole living with me while she was going to culinary school was that she had to hand over her gourmet pizza recipe. Since she heads back to Munich real soon, I had her walk me through her Pizza recipe last week. Yes techies can cook!

We started in the morning with the dough. Here is what we used:

1 1/2 c. flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 c. warm water (max. 100 deg. F)

1/2 tsp. dry active yeast or 1 tsp. fresh yeast

a pinch or two of sugar

1 tsp. flour.

We used 2 parts all purpose flour and 1 part slept flour, but maybe would do 3 to 1 next time. Before I left for work it the morning we made the dough and I had lots of fun making it! Adding the yeast was the most fun. As I was working all day, the dough was rising.

When I got home we went to work on the rest. First up was the sauce. Here is the recipe for the sauce:

About 350 grams of whole, peeled tomatoes

2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced (Nicole minced it!)

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

a few leaves of fresh basil

So I put the tomatoes into the blender and added everything in to a pot and let it simmer.

Ok lastly we brought it all together! The oven was set to 500 degrees. I took the dough and rolled out to fit onto a 12 inch pizza pan. Rolling was cool. By now I started to drink wine and Kathleen (the guinea pig) arrived and was starting to distract me and Nicole was on the phone, so I was really flying without a net! Once I put the dough on the pan, I put on the sauce and toppings. Kathleen wanted Mushrooms on her side of the pizza. We also added corn and zucchini. I was also accused of being a onion hog.

So I put it in and after about 8 minutes I put on the basil and fresh mozzarella. I left the pizza in for about 4 more minutes and out came my masterpiece!

One of the coolest places I have even been to, Aguas Calientes at the foot of Machu Piccu , was hit by a big mudslide. The rail link was covered and hundreds of tourists are stranded and 11 people died.

This is sad since it is the only town around. It is a 5 day trek to Cusco over a 13,000 pass. I'll be thinking about eveyone down there this weekend.

I have to say that today I am proud to be a member of the Association of Competitive Technology since its inception. I have been very active with them, ACT has put me in front of Congress several times on a variety of tech issues.

ACT is demanding that the state of Michigan and the U.S Department of Justice immediately withdraw their lawsuit against Oracle Corp, a suit I find silly.

ACT won’t bring this up, but in the late 90s when ACT was advocating the DOJ drop their lawsuit against Microsoft, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s absolutely insane Chair and CEO hired a private investigator to go through our garbage in the ACT headquarters in WashingtonDC. So I have a pretty large personal dislike of Larry, and still think the DOJ is wrong.

I am going to be staying with Malek at his house in Casablanca in a guest room (along with Clemens). I guess we will have it out with rows and columns for das Blog with Malek the referee.

This is a very international event and speakers from all over the world are going to be there along with a strong showing of fellow Regional Directors. There will be a slew of technical information on both current stuff and Longhorn, Whidbey and Yukon.

The Mets won their first game of the year last night, defeating the evil Atlanta Braves. Rookie Kaz Matsui from Japan hit a home run in the first pitch he saw in the Majors, and went 3 for 3, go Japan power!

The Treaty of Versailles was probably less obvious. Sun’s agreement with Microsoft on Friday further doomed Sun Microsystems. Sure Scott and Steve can be on stage together all they like and exchange hockey jerseys declaring “peace“, but it really was Sun giving up a worthless front in the war for its survival.

Microsoft has never really been a super threat to Sun. Maybe recently with Windows Server 2003, but in the last 20 years of Scott calling Bill Darth Vader or making fun of the fact that Bill Dropped out of Harvard, Microsoft was the boy in Redmond that everyone in the Valley loved to hate.

So while Sun was announcing layoffs and blackmailing Microsoft for 1.8 billion in the same day, they pulled off a great coup. Sensing that settling with Sun would help Microsoft end its legal problems (Sun also said the settlement satisfies the objectives the company was pursuing in the European Union actions pending against Microsoft.), Sun used Bill and Co for a desperate influx of cash. Too bad it is too little to late.

Even after cutting almost 10% of its workforce and doing a management shakeup, Sun is still on life support. Linux is really Public Enemy Number 1 for Sun. Sun has no Linux strategy and Linux is a technology that could render Sun obsolete. Linux is based off Unix and makes it obsolete since it is more modern and cheaper (Linux is not free). Sun sells Unix. Linux runs on low end machines. Sun’s Unix does not. Sun makes lots of money selling very expensive hardware. That business is getting worse and worse by the day.

Not to mention IBM’s recent love-fest with Linux and more recent attacks on Sun. This makes IBM public enemy #2 for Sun.

Maybe Scott should sue Linux and IBM too…After over 7 years of using the American and European legal systems and costing the taxpayers billions, Sun got a few month operating cash out of Microsoft. I hope you use it wisely.

Netscape co-founder, Marc Andreessen speaking at the 3rd annual "Open Source in Government" at George Washington University in Washington DC last week, and came up with his personal top twelve reasons for why open source will boom over the next 5-10 years. Too bad they are all wrong, here is my point by point rebuttal. Here they are:

1."The Internet is powered by open source."

Steve’s Rebuttal: Not true Mark. Microsoft’s IIS server powers the majority of the internet. On the client side Internet Explorer is the dominate client.

2."The Internet is the carrier for open source."

Steve’s Rebuttal: True, but also it is a carrier for all other types of software, just browse the internet and there are tons of sites selling the stuff.

3."The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."

Steve’s Rebuttal: I prefer my software development teams all in the same room, not scattered around the world in different time zones. I know it is all cool and “new age” to say you want to have a team all spread out around the world, but it is just not at all efficient. All management gurus are on my side, sorry. This was cool in the dot com phase, time for the industry to grow up.

Steve’s Rebuttal: And NOT profit. This ensures that only cool features get built, NOT the mission critical features. Where is incremental backup and replication in postgress. What about transactions and stored procedures missing for so long in MySQL. See my blog here. Sorry Marc, capitalism works, just ask our friends in the USSR.

7."Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."

Steve’s Rebuttal: This is so vaigue, I am beginning to think that you are taking yourself way too seriously. My thoughts are that Microsoft, Apple, SUN, SAP, etc are a giants.

8."Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."

Steve’s Rebuttal: As does Microsoft. TCO for Microsoft is much lower than Linux. I have proven this so many times I am sick of doing so. See my New York City Council testimony.

9."Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."

Steve’s Rebuttal: This is flat out false.

10."There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."

Steve’s Rebuttal: What are they then, hobbyists? They are not doing QA then? No code reviews? Is the software mission critical? Are they using Linux? And who cares if they are making software then?

11."Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."

Steve’s Rebuttal: That is grand. They are also supporting Sun and Microsoft and many other technologies.

12."It's free."

Steve’s Rebuttal: Not true. Linux is NOT FREE. See my New York City Council testimony.

For a long time it has been asserted as "fact" about Linux being more secure because it's OPEN and therefore more eyes look at the code and are able to secure it easier. Naive Marc “right place at the right time” Andreessen lists it as the 4th reason in his “why open source is better” list.

This “fact” is dead wrong. I have always believed that Linux will be far LESS secure than propriety software since all it takes is one bad hacker to ruin they day. In a new report, Is Linux More Secure Than Windows? from Forrester Research Inc., says that Microsoft fixes security problems faster! One of the benefits of open source is that there are so many free developers working non stop to fix bugs fast. But somehow Microsoft seems to fix things faster. Guess Adam Smith was right after all.

The industry and the author of the article from Forrester believe that based the available data on the past security vulnerabilities, security vulnerabilities follow a timeline from discovery to fix. During this timeline hackers exploit the vulnerability. (Hackers have a “time to market” so to speak that is getting quicker and quicker, see below.)

Since the goal is to fix the vulnerabilities faster to reduce attacks then Microsoft is actually more secure. Microsoft took an average of 25 days to fix a vulnerability and RedHat took an average of 57 days.

Now forget the MS v Linux issue (more on that soon), but we have to take some responsibility ourselves, no matter what the OS. We have to install patches. Prior to the Nimda worm being released the patch for the exploit had existed for 331 days. SQL Slammer, 6 months. Welchia/ Nachi just over 5 months. Recently with the Blaster worm the patch for the exploit was released only 25 days before the worm was released. In each case a patch was available. We are seeing hackers watching for security alerts and then using those alerts to create exploits and take advantage of the fact that deploying security patches is a complex process in the corporate space or simply not done in the end-user space.